Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast. Tonight, I want to tell you a story

about a drink and a fruit and a number that millions of people are quietly betting their sleep on

without ever having seen it. The number is eight. Hold on to it. We will come back to it, and when we do,

it is going to feel a great deal smaller than it should. Here is how the thing began. In the first

months of 2023, a young woman on TikTok posted a short video of herself making a bedtime drink.

A few weeks later, a wellness creator posted her own version,

and that second video took off the way these things do.

Without warning, without logic, the algorithm deciding overnight

that the entire planet needed to see a woman

pour cherry juice into a wine glass. The creator who lit the fuse had a reason for the drink

that was particular to her. She had polycystic ovary syndrome. Her sleep fell apart in the back half of her cycle, and she had

found that this concoction seemed to help. Hold on to that detail too. We are going to come back to it

at the end. Almost nobody who copied her ever mentioned it. People rarely copy the reason.

They copy the recipe. And the recipe could not have

been simpler, about half a cup of pure tart cherry juice, a spoonful of magnesium powder, a splash

of prebiotic soda on top, a lemon lime can of something like olipop served over ice in stemware so that the act of not

drinking alcohol looks as much as possible like drinking alcohol. They called it the sleepy girl

mocktail. Within a year, the hashtag had been viewed tens of millions of times. Grocery stores noticed something they

almost never notice, which is a sudden, inexplicable run on bottles of unsweetened tart cherry juice,

a product that for most of its commercial life had been bought mainly by gout sufferers and the occasional marathon runner.

A sour ruby-colored juice no one would drink for pleasure had become, more or less overnight,

a sleep aid with a cult. Now here is what interests me. A folk remedy went global in a matter of weeks.

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